Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Centric CRM (second nomination)

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was delete. Proto///type 11:06, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

Centric CRM

Previously deleted with different content at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Centric CRM I checked this out, Google returns about 185 unique hits (some thousands total, including lots of forum posts). No evidence of user base, innovation, market share, turnover or any other objective measure of encyclopaedic notability. Just zis Guy you know? 22:12, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

• Delete as a recreation of non-notable material. — Saxifrage ✎ 22:18, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Comment: Hmmm... I'm not sure how you reach the conclusions you do. Centric CRM has over 5,000 registered users in the development community. If you actually visit the community you will see a very active and robust set of forums with countless posts on a daily basis.

As for innovation, Centric CRM was named a finalist for LinuxWorld's Product Excellence awards 2 months ago at LinuxWorld Boston. The product's approach to CRM which marries traditional CRM functionality found in products like Salesforce.com with sophisticated functionality like Document Management, automated customer surveys, collaborative project managment, content management and e-commerce is unique in the CRM space. As an example, the Centric CRM developer community with its discussion forums, wikis, newsgroups, code repositories and so forth, is run entirely on Centric CRM itself.

As for user base, companies like The Weather Channel and other Fortune 500 companies are using Centric CRM throughout their organizations today, in addition to many SMBs throughout the world. More significant customer engagements will be announced in the months ahead as those projects clear their NDA requirements. On the partnership side, some of the leading infrastructure companies in the IT space are forming strategic partnerships with Centric CRM because of its unique position in the marketplace as a true enterprise class open source application. Announcements on these fronts will be forthcoming over the next 6 weeks, as will related articles in the press and online.

Centric CRM has been under continuous development for over 6 years, comprises millions of lines of code, and has been embraced by some of the world's largest companies. A deliberately low profile has been kept during that time while the pieces of a valuable business were put in place; sort of an old fashioned way of doing things, in this age when a couple guys with an idea can get millions of dollars of VC funding. The profile of the product is now being deilberately raised as part of a larger effort to expand its awareness and penetration into the market at large. Posting an article to Wikipedia is but one small step of that larger process.

That Centric CRM has no "encyclopaedic notability" seems to me a hasty conclusion based not on verifiable fact (development community size and vigor; technical sophistication of the product; quality of customers; etc.) but on a single datapoint--number of Google hits. I encourage you to look a little deeper before drawing your conclusion. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Mdh98368 (talk • contribs) .

That's all very interesting, but the argument has two flaws. The first is that it does not directly address the concerns of Wikipedia, but that is excusable because you probably haven't been made aware of them. Wikipedia:Notability (software) is the project document that details how the notability of software like Centric CRM is judged. From what you've said above, criterion #6 is the closest one to being satisfied: can you provide a citation for the LinuxWorld award/honor?

The second flaw is where you say, "The profile of the product is now being deilberately raised as part of a larger effort to expand its awareness and penetration into the market at large. Posting an article to Wikipedia is but one small step of that larger process." That's specifically a Do Not at Wikipedia. (See Wikipedia:Vanity and Wikipedia:Autobiography.) Wikipedia is an academic project, not an advertising platform or a web directory. Using it as a platform for promotion makes editors rather hostile, often to the point that an article that is on the borderline for being included, as, say, one might be if it got a marginal honor in line with criterion #6, will get voted out of existence on principle. — Saxifrage ✎ 18:15, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for responding. Thanks also for the link to the "notability" page, since that helps clarify the policies A quick Google Search on the topic of Centric CRM as a finalist for LinuxWorld's product excellence awards returns multiple citations. As for published pieces, there is Michael Caton's-- e-Week's Techncial Analyst--piece in e-Week. At least two long articles in the print editions of 2 separate and well-respected industry magazines will hit the newsstands in July and in August. For an independent opinion on Centric CRM's technological sophistication, I could put you in contact with Brian Shield, CTO of The Weather Channel, who has moved TWC's entire help-desk operation onto Centric CRM.

My purpose in submitting the article is not commercial gain. Rather, we are proud of the approach taken in designing and building Centric CRM. Unlike many commercial software ventures, Centric CRM's design and execution would please a computer scientist. As an avid user and fan of Wikipedia, the thought of having the company listed there would be very gratifying. Over the next few weeks, my intention was to begin posting some interesting technical information about the product, discussing its MVC design pattern, its incorporation of the JSR 168 (portlet) spec, and so forth. Information, in other words, that is intended to be of general interest to other wikipedia users interested in open source, CRM, and innovative applications of advanced technologies. I hope that you will allow the article to stand. Mdh98368 (talk • contribs) .

But these are not "multiple non-trivial mentions". Your comment above is very revealing: WP:NOT a promotional tool. Just zis Guy you know? 21:47, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Criterion #6 isn't satisfied by the LinuxWorld mention, as nominations are not awards. The eWeek piece is a very minor news piece and future articles don't count, so #1 isn't satisfied either. Numbers 2 through 5 don't apply. So, it is non-notable. — Saxifrage ✎ 23:08, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Fine, my apologies. I submitted the entry a month too early. Forgive the enthusiasm. Talk to you in a few weeks when your objections have been addressed by external events in the marketplace. (talk • contribs)

More like, come back and talk when someone who is not in a conflict of interest has decided that the software warrants an article, and then contribute to it. Vanity is still vanity. — Saxifrage ✎ 02:23, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.